For a long time, dental prostheses have been produced, depending on their use, as inlays, onlays or bridges and, depending on the expense justified in the individual case, from an amalgam, gold or porcelain. When using an amalgam, shaping is performed in situ, i.e. in the mouth of the patient, in that the moldable amalagam material is placed in the not yet hardened state into the cavities to be filled. Some build-up of material outside the cavity is also possible, wherein the shaping takes place either in the form of molding the pliable amalagam, or by means of grinding tools for the hardened amalagam. When using gold or porcelain, shaping is performed by the dental technician, generally in accordance with a cast, or respectively duplicate, of the dental prosthesis to be produced, which was previously made in the mouth of the patient.
Since amalagams as well as gold or porcelain have not given satisfactory results in every respect, it has been tried for some time to produce dental prostheses from plastic. It has been shown here that the durability of such dental prostheses can be considerably improved, if the plastic used for this is reinforced with glass fibers. However, until now glass fiber-reinforced plastics have been little used in dental medicine. Known dental prostheses are produced from bundles of glass fibers, which are soaked in a liquid plastic material acting as an adhesive. Shaping is performed manually in the manner of molding. Because of the manual process steps, the physical properties of such dental prostheses are not assured, in addition, changes in volume can take place during hardening of the known materials.